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My Unlikely Friendship with El Bilito

Writer Denise Chávez' unique take on Billy the Kid...

By Denise Chávez 

As a Sureña, a Southern New Mexican, my life is full of the Legend and Lore of this place I call home. As a writer I have been followed by the Ghost of Billy the Kid for years and now claim him as S...

"Bandit Queen" put men and the law through meatgrinder

How infamous lady outlaw Belle Starr won the Game of Thrones in the Wild Wild West.

Belle Starr really knew how to get out of a jam.

Born a southern aristocrat, she became a scout for the ruthless Bill Quantrill’s guerillas in the Civil War. 

She had an illegitimate child with a roving brigand before “settling ...

How the West was Black

As another Black History Month crosses the calendar, many across the nation are taking a look at the tragedies and triumphs of the African-American experience, from slavery to Selma, from Harlem to Atlanta. But what about the Black history of the West?

by Jo Lutz

As another Black History Month crosses the calendar, many across the nation are taking a look at the tragedies and triumphs of the African-American experience, from past to present, slavery to Selma, Jim Crow to Martin Luther King. From Harlem t...

Haunted New Mexico, from bullets to bouffants

by Jo Lutz, Museum Staff

The strangest part was when her entire record collection warped, sitting right in the closet, as though from extreme heat. She would find out from the subsequent homeowner that a lock of Gary’s hair was stored in a jar...

...on the top shelf of that closet.

What made Alice Good Medicine sell the house was when a man’s shadow spied on her in the hot tub from the bedroom window. That was the last straw.

Alice and her husband Casey had only just bought the house. It i...